Managerial Insights
The New Chinese Web Celebrities, between Growth of the Digital Economy and a Government Squeeze
What ever happened to the "lipstick king?" Is Li Jiaqi, also known as Austin Li, still able to sell 15,000 lip glosses in five hours of streaming, or does his work have to adapt to the new China of shared prosperity and the ban on effeminate looks? With his 45 million followers on Douyin, the original Chinese version of the social network that in Europe we know as TikTok, Li may be the best-known of Chinese influencers and the digital economy that has developed around them, known as the "Wanghong economy." There is no doubt that Livestreamers, KOL (key opinion leaders), and new social platforms ...
Si vis pacem, para bellum: Afghanistan, the Taliban, and Financial Quarantine
The European Union is deciding if and when to reopen relations with the new government of Afghanistan. The EU, like almost all of the international community, has stated that it is worried about possible actions by the Taliban regime that could violate the population's civil and political rights. So it is not considering the possibility of a formal recognition of the regime. At the same time, there must be a decision on how to open a "calibrated relationship" with the Taliban government – the expression used by Brussels – to prevent other countries from gaining additional space, countries ...
Enemy Number One: Rhetoric
Diversity Management (DM), understood as a set of policies, practices, and actions that, in the context of human resources management, are aimed at managing the diversity of workers, began its entry and spread in Europe and Italy starting at the end of the 1990s through branches of large companies from the English-speaking world. Currently, abetted above all by the health emergency that has contributed to giving visibility to the limited attention focused on the issue of diversity, DM has spread in most industrialized countries. What is known as the "She-cession,"[1] that describes the strong ...
Kabul, Beijing, and the Geopolitics of the Ecological Transition
Afghanistan is a land of treasure. Recently, the international press, and it appears, the new Taliban government as well, have been anxiously following the fate of the Bactrian treasure, discovered in the north of Afghanistan shortly before the Soviet invasion of 1979. In six tombs that can be dated from the first century BCE to the first century CE, archeologists led by Viktor Sarianidi found more than 20,000 artifacts, including gold amorettos, dolphins, divinities, and dragons studded with turquoise, cornel, and lapis lazuli, but also rings, coins, weapons, earrings, bracelets, necklaces, and ...
Evergrande: The Chinese Version of Lehman Brothers?
Does Evergrande risk becoming the Chinese version of Lehman Brothers? It's a legitimate question, that for weeks has been the focus of attention of financial analysts and the pages of the largest newspapers. There is certainly the fear that the collapse of a company this size could have repercussions on the entire Chinese financial system, but for the authorities in Beijing, it seems more important not to betray the promise to teach a lesson to the debt-laden behemoths in the country. So those who expected a state rescue have been disappointed, but that doesn't mean that "Chinese characteristics" ...
The Renaissance of Sustainable Real Estate (with Patient Capital)
The real estate market is no longer a static element of the global economy, thanks to the combination of new factors linked to supply and demand, including interest rates, inflation, private real estate, and urban regeneration. In this article, we will shed light on some of the most important factors of the real estate market as tools for social attractiveness, as well as its intangible assets and its role as an agent for culture and social inclusion, concluding with a comment on the sustainability of real estate as an element that attracts patient capital. Unconventional monetary policy and interest ...
ECB: The New Route Between Hawks and Doves
Last July, the president of the European Central Bank Christine Lagarde announced a strategy review of ECB monetary policy. There was great anticipation of what the new inflation target would be. The expectations were understandable: explicitly stating the inflation target, as we will see later, is the key to monetary policy, representing the main tool to orient expectations. The importance of the link between the inflation target and management of expectations is an issue on which hawks and doves can generally agree. But things change when we question the quantitative formulation of that target. It ...
The Revolution Comes Lying Down
“If you can’t get up and you refuse to kneel, all you can do is lie flat.” It sounds like the slogan of a non-violent revolution, and it may be just that; at least in China. It all began with a post online last April: “Lying flat means justice.”[1] The author is Luo Huazhong, a young man who left his alienating factory job at 26 years of age to travel around by bicycle, and after returning to his home town, decided to share his new lifestyle: reduce consumption to the minimum and enjoy the little things, work only as much as necessary to earn what he needs to eat and have clothes, and ...
The SPAC Market: the Cases of the United States and Italy
SPACs (Special Purpose Acquisition Companies) are financial instruments created almost twenty years ago in the United States. Economia&Management dealt with these types of companies back in 2017 and 2018,[1] assessing the situation in the US and Italy; in the latter, SPACs emerged in 2011 not structured based on specific regulations or laws, but through a combination of legal forms allowed for other types of financial companies. When we speak of SPACs, we always need to refer to the regulation based on which each has been constructed. Despite having the same goals, different jurisdictions can ...
Brexit and the City
In Italy, we cut red ribbons at Christmas when we open gifts. Across the Channel, cutting red ribbons is an obsession that dominates public debate, reaching a fever pitch when the European Union is involved. Naturally, we’re not talking about the ribbons used for holidays, but of “red tape,” the term used in the United Kingdom to refer to an apparently infinite series of bureaucratic procedures that prevent the animal spirits of the market from giving free play to their creative instincts. The use of the term red tape comes from the fact that in the past, legal documentation was in fact ...